"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Friday and Saturday, I worked for hours to research and write my report on “fame whore” Julia Baugher (a/k/a Julia Allison), who was once featured on national magazine covers, who appeared as a frequent guest on Fox News, who had her own Bravo reality-TV series in 2012, who has written for Cosmo, Elle, Huffington Post and other publications.

This Georgetown University alumna, who 10 years ago was the illustrious example of becoming “Internet Famous,” has left more burning bridges behind her than Sherman marching through Georgia. And while my Saturday report hit most of the highlights (and lowlights) of her biography, even 3,000 words did not suffice to encompass every noteworthy debacle in the descending spiral of this erstwhile celebrity who has outlived her 15 minutes of fame. Where to begin with collecting the remaining debris from this shipwrecked life? Well, in February 2014, Miss Baugher spoke on a journalism school panel at the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Feminism/s Presents: Sex in Journalism,” and her biographical blurb in the event program read thus:

Julia Allison, 32, is a nationally recognized journalist, relationship expert, public speaker, former BRAVO star and 2008 WIRED cover girl. She is currently at work writing her first book, Experiments in Happiness, to published Spring 2015 by St. Martin’s Press. A veteran tv commentator and host, Allison has made hundreds of appearances on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, E!, MSNBC, VH1 and MTV, and has published several hundred articles for publications as diverse as ELLE, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, New York magazine and The New York Post, covering everything from Burning Man to Comic Con to NY Fashion Week to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as well as interviewing unconventional experts in the realm of happiness and relationships, and examining the impact of technology and social media on culture. She has spoken at conferences around the world as well as universities like MIT, Wharton, Harvard on new media, personal branding, unconventional purpose driven marketing, and hacking happiness. Allison got her start as the (sometimes controversial) dating columnist for Georgetown University when she was an undergraduate. A recovering social media addict with over 300k combined Facebook and Twitter followers, she’s lived in New York, LA, DC and Chicago. Now she lives, loves, and experiments with happiness (and a lot of yoga) in San Francisco.

Among the many items on this list, “former BRAVO star” might catch your attention. Her reality-TV series flamed out like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst after eight episodes. The premise was this: Three “relationship experts” (Miss Baugher, a freelance columnist; Emily Morse, host of a San Francisco radio show called “Sex With Emily”; and New York “executive matchmaker” Amy Laurent) would be shown doing their professional work, and also in their private lives because (ironic twist) all of them were past 30 and didn’t have relationships of their own. No husbands, no steady boyfriends — they were personally failing in the precise area of life at which they were selling themselves as “experts”!

Julia Allison has (finally) experienced a much-needed breakthrough when it comes to love and finding Mr. Right.“I was completely delusional,” the Miss Advised star admits to TV Guide about her search for a husband. “I thought the problem was I couldn’t find the right guy but … I had created an idea of what marriage should be based on my parents involving the suburbs, monogamy and daily routines I’m not interested in. I was setting up a situation where I’d fail.”
But that’s not the case today. “I realized I can make my own rules and I don’t have to have the relationship my parents had,” explains the Illinois native, who also learned another valuable love lesson recently — turn it down a notch.
“The skillset I have learned to utilize in my career — which is aggressive, masculine, focused, directed — that is not the energy you want to bring on a date,” says the expert on personal branding. “I was interrogating these guys and I always thought that was very charming and it was not charming to watch! There was no romantic energy. I’m starting to believe the things that make you good in a career make you bad in a relationship.”
Add one more newfound belief to the pile. “I’m starting to believe people who have chronic problems need to have a camera crew follow them. It was massively effective.”

Did she solve her “chronic problems”? Did the discovery that she could “make my own rules” lead her to happiness without all those “delusional” routines of suburban monogamy? Well, she’s an expert on happiness, too. Remember her book, Experiments in Happiness, which she said would be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015? That didn’t happen.

Experiments in Happiness
How I Learned to Live a Life Filled With Love,
Creativity, Meaning…and a Little Bit of Magic
When Julia Allison — acclaimed journalist, relationship expert, and lady-about-town — set out to discover what was holding her back from happiness, she didn’t just pick up a self-help book: she wanted to write her own. Chronicling her unconventional experiments as a “guinea pig of happiness,” Allison takes readers through her journey with her characteristic charm, humor, and warmth. For anyone feeling unsettled in their hectic urban life, and for devotees of Allison’s trademark style, Experiments in Happiness is a road worth travelling on.

This “road worth travelling on” proved to be a road to nowhere.

Miss Baugher scored her book deal in September 2013, based on an 81-page proposal that included a lot of revelations about herself. Did you know that she used to have a big nose, and had not one, but two nose jobs, the first at age 19? Did you know (well, anyone could easily guess) that she “felt like an outcast, an unpopular misfit” in high school, was bulimic and, during her peak of fame circa 2007, she would “cry myself to sleep, then wake up the next day, aching with emptiness”?

Ah, but her proposal promised the cure for unhappiness, via numerous “experiments,” and it also promised interviews with all kinds of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Tina Fey to the “Duck Dynasty” family. Her marketing proposal involved selling herself as the Happiness Expert™ with lots of media tie-ins, perhaps including a movie based on the book. Her proposal included “20 reasons this book will be a runaway bestseller” that promised a blog (“URLs . . . already registered”) aimed at “creating a worldwide following of people who are excited to evangelize and take action.” The term for this is: Bipolar, manic phase.

It never happened. Her boyfriend dumped her, she fell into a depression, turned in a manuscript that did not deliver what she’d promised in her original manic-phase proposal and, when re-writes couldn’t fix it, the publisher finally demanded she return the advance money.

In the case of Julia Baugher, the people she calls “haters” are the operators and commenters at a blog called RebloggingDonk which has chronicled and mocked everything she’s done for years. All her failures and excuses, every attempt to “re-invent” herself — RebloggingDonk is the dossier, the archival source on Miss Baugher’s spectacular descent from Manhattan socialite to . . . well, what is she anymore?

For two years, she was a fixture on the hippie festival circuit, following around her DJ boyfriend “Rain Phutureprimitive” (a/k/a Chad McNally) but that ended last year when he decided he was into “polyamory” (a/k/a, screwing around, threesomes, orgies, etc.). In June, in a column for the New York Post, Miss Baugher said she had recently “started seeing someone I never would have dated 10 years earlier,” a guy she called “a very reasonable choice.” Guess how that turned out?

I began seeing someone in late March — the first person I dated since Rain & I broke up, and the first after my 8 months of Bali celibacy (Balibacy?? Lol). We weren’t exclusive (my choice, I didn’t want to get “too serious” too fast) — but despite those efforts, it really wasn’t casual. At all.
As I should have anticipated (because I’m in my thirties and I’ve gone through approximately 568 breakups) … the new relationship was rife with explosions of pain from wounds I THOUGHT I had healed during my time in Bali, but which had instead merely burrowed deeper (oops!), waiting for the next unsuspecting fellow to begin falling in love with me and say something stupid like, “I love you! You’re the One!” only for me to FREAK THE F OUT and screech, “Oh, YOU LOVE me, do you? You want to marry me?! THE LAST 8 GUYS SAID THAT TOO AND WE BROKE UP!!! I DON’T BELIEVE YOU!!!! AHHHH!!!”
To which this poor human just stood there like, “I genuinely do not have a clear sense of what to say or do in this moment so I am going to slowly back away and try not to make any sudden movements because it’s possible you may bite my D. And not in the sexy way.”
And thus I decided that I’m actually not ready — in this moment — for a new relationship, unless it’s with a therapist.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t step up and make some commitments. Here’s to reimagining everything! In this case, segueing out of dating into friendship.

Remember, she’s a “relationship expert,” known for her “characteristic charm, humor, and warmth,” who promised to write a bestselling book on happiness, but couldn’t deliver an acceptable manuscript.

What’s wrong with her? What’s the diagnosis? My guess is she probably has a lot of issues with guilt and shame, which is a common problem with promiscuous women. If she sought advice from a clergyman, I hope he would ask her: “Do you ever feel as if you’ve been cursed? As if your suffering is divine payback for things you did wrong years ago?”

Because that’s what causes a lot of mental illness — guilt and shame. It’s easy to throw around a lot of diagnostic terms. Julia Baugher is a textbook Cluster B personality disorder, most likely narcissistic, with many symptoms of borderline, as well. As previously indicated, she also shows some mood disorder symptoms, with the grandiosity of manic-phase bipolar followed by the crash of depression and failure.

Yet all of her problems are rooted in her sense of guilt and shame, and here’s the thing: I believe she should be ashamed, and that if she feels like she’s cursed, she should trust that feeling. You know why?

As it turns out, I’m the kind of girl who believes in witches. . . .
After a childhood of church on Sundays with Mom and Dad, I quickly segued into a rabid-feminist-Ayn-Rand objectivist and adamant adolescent atheist. But during a rough patch at 26, I found myself reading Marianne Williamson’s seminal spiritual bestseller, A Return to Love, and spent the next few years studying and developing a deep faith and integrating “New Age” ideas like yoga, acupuncture, meditation, ashrams, and holistic medicine into my life.
My litmus test is simple: Do I feel better coming out of the experience and in the days that follow? If so, as far as I’m concerned, it works. Because of that, The House of Intuition, a sacred spot in East L.A. that offers everything from chakra balancing to crystal healing, has become my temple du jour. And they offer witches. . . .
I begin my session with Maja. She asks what brings me here, and I explain my sense of being stuck in dating Groundhog Day, making the same mistakes over and over and over.
“If you want to know the future,” she says by way of introduction, “look at what’s happening right now.” . . .
First, she asks me to write down on a sheet of paper all of the past negative patterns I’ve been harboring in my love life. We fold those up and put them in—yes—a cauldron. Then Maja hands me another sheet and asks me to list ten characteristics I’m looking for in “the perfect man.” . . .
Next, Maja has me mold a little clay figurine, called a golem, which will symbolize the romantically troubled me. Placing the golem in the cauldron with the two lists, she lights them on fire while chanting what I assume is my love spell. She asks me to stand over the cauldron and breathe deeply, allowing all of the negativity of my past to leave my body and enter the golem. I do as requested and almost burst into tears feeling the emotions flowing out of me—all the loneliness, disappointment, rejection, and shame. I want this pain gone.
“You are recreating yourself,” Maja explains. And I actually feel like I am. . . .
Magda, the Gypsy Witch, then enters the room. She’s in charge of sealing the golem in a little (admittedly creepy!) casket, which she then instructs I throw away as quickly as possible. . . .
That next week, I toss my golem into the Pacific Ocean. It comes back three times before I finally give up and bury it in the sand. What happened that day at the House of Intuition was powerful.

Don’t you know that witchcraft is cursed? All that kind of stuff — astrology, tarot cards, “New Age” spiritualism — is cursed by God, and it will bring only evil to those who pursue it. Notice the apostate path that Julia Baugher traveled, from church on Sunday as a child to atheist feminism as a teenager until, at age 26, she picked up Marianne Williamson’s book, a notorious specimen of “New Age” fraud:

“A Course in Miracles,” a 1,249-page study manual, was authored by the “inner voice” of research psychologist Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972. Schucman, a professor at Columbia University and a self-described atheist at the time, claims the “voice” was that of Jesus Christ.
In 1977, New Age guru and best-selling author Marianne Williamson discovered “A Course in Miracles” and helped spread its message internationally, reeling in stars such as Oprah Winfrey and Shirley MacLaine along the way.
Today, the course has sold more than 1 million copies, and more than 2,000 groups in the United States meet to study the course, which Williamson calls “a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy.” . . .
Critics of “A Course in Miracles” warn that Catholics who try to incorporate its principles into their faith will severely compromise their beliefs because the two theologies are completely incompatible.
Father Pacwa said the course repeatedly misquotes the Bible and “presents a false Jesus.” . . .
The “Jesus” of “A Course in Miracles” is not really the Son of God, never really had a physical body, and hence never really suffered on the cross.

Wake up and smell the Gnostic heresy, a satanic deception that the Bible warns against. The beliefs promoted by Marianne Williamson are a counterfeit of pagan syncretism. In case you didn’t recognize her name, Williamson was “one of the spiritual advisers of the first lady Hillary Clinton, with whom she often lunches. She has dined at the White House and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom” (Peter Jones, Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America, 1997). It is certainly no surprise that, having turned to Williamson’s false teachings in her 20s, Julia Baugher then pursued “yoga, acupuncture, meditation, ashrams, and holistic medicine” — the New Age highway to Hell. By the time she was consulting psychics and witches, the apostate had already been traveling that highway for five years. And what’s happened to her since?

Disaster after disaster. If she feels cursed, she should trust that feeling. She is like the pagan Romans who “became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . . God gave them up unto vile affections . . . God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (Romans 1:21-22, 26, 28).

“The journey of falling in love with ourselves is the most fundamental journey we take in our lifetimes,” according to the invitation to this ceremony at the Chillax Lounge of Camp Mystic during the festival in the Nevada desert. The invitation promised an “exuberant celebration & sacred ritual of self-love,” to be followed by “old school 80s & 90s dance music during a rocking post-ceremony reception.”

Narcissism + bipolar manic phase = grandiosity!

Julia Baugher and friends on the day of her self-wedding, 2014.

If she is “aching with emptiness,” it’s because she has no soul. Whenever you encounter someone preaching sermons about “self-love,” you know that they are soulless, lost beyond hope of redemption, given over to a “reprobate mind” that leads them into narcissistic delusion, an idolatrous Cult of the Ego. What was the lie the Serpent told in Eden? “Ye shall be as gods.” And so here is Julia Baugher in 2014, having followed the New Age path — yoga and ashrams, psychics and witches — into the desert, where she engaged in a blasphemous travesty of matrimony.

Four years and three ex-boyfriends later, she’s 37 and so completely filled with craziness that when Mr. Reasonable started falling in love with her, she erupted in a fit of screaming fury and realized that the only “relationship” she’s capable of now is with a therapist.

Y’know what’s weird? Everybody who knows me knows I’m an egomaniac, and pride goeth before a fall, but you’ve never heard me rambling on about “falling in love with ourselves,” have you? No. Never forget, we are all “sinners in the hands of angry God,” entirely dependent on His mercy, with His grace our only hope of salvation.

Cursed? Yes, indeed, but also blessed, and grateful for God’s blessings, including the example of what happens to fools who follow the wrong path, turning down the road that leads to destruction.

[…] is giving life advice, even though her own life is an absolute train-wreck. The post titled Fame Whore Update: Relationship Expert Fails and Good-Bye, ‘Reasonable’ Man is worth reading for entertainment value alone. As one of McCain’s reader’s puts it, […]